Wednesday, October 30, 2013

These photos are taken by me during a road trip in northern Iran, starting from Chalus, near Caspian Sea, driving up the Alborz mountain, and then descending the Haraz toward Tehran. The date is January 7, 2011.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Bridges-Go-Around (1958), made by
one of the forerunner Jazz Film artists of all time, Shirley Clarke, is a
short film, or more precisely two shorts in one. Composed of a series
of shots from New York bridges, the film, in its first half, is edited
and synced with the music of Teo Macero.
For the second half, the very same images, as the first half, are
repeated, but this time they are accompanied by the electronic music of Louis and Bebe Barron. So Bridges-Go-Around
is a film which is played twice, but each projection, thanks to
specific effects created by each musical genre, gives a distinctive
impression and even the meaning of the images change and assiduously
contrast/complete/comment on the other half.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Last year I made a documentary about Iranian cinema through the refreshing eyes of Mark Cousins. A Journey Through Iranian Cinema with Mark Cousins is a small road movie about Iranian cinema and Mark's multiple journeys to my country that thanks to my good friend Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and John Sinno of Typecast Films) was distributed in North America and recently was shown in two film festivals in Canada (Toronto) and the US (my favorite unvisited city, New Orleans).

Now the good news is that the film will be screened at the University of London's SOAS, on the last day of October, followed by a Q&A with me and Mark (on Skype from Scotland). I'm shy, moody and not a good talker, but I'm sure Mark has many stories to tell from his various trips to Iran and his interviews and films with and about filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf and many more.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

For the previous posts [here and here] about translating Anglo-American or French film culture in Iran, I mostly focused on journals. Now I would elaborate more on the unauthorized translation of the major and minor film books.

The rules of the game are more or less similar to those of journals. The names who make it to the translations are a combination of current trends (Slavoj Žižek), cult figures (Jean-Luc Godard) and the essential texts (David Bordwell/Kristin Thompson).

The translators are whether the per-revolutionary cinephiles, now trying to retain the memories of a cinephilic haven via written text, or a new generation of one-off, clandestine translators who are often young university graduates, showing their passion for a filmmaker
or writer by translating them. The latter group always starts on
its own, without having a contract or handshake with the publisher, and of course with no guarantee on
publishing the finished work or passing the labyrinth of censorship.

Is there any financial motivation behind this? Based on some statistics, personal observations and conversations with those who do it, I would say no, at least, for the translator who is always the sole driving force behind this cultural reproduction. The publishing industry in any format, whether book or journal, has been one of the key victims of the post-sanction Iran, if not mentioning the ruined economy of Ahmadinejad's Iran. During the eight year of Ahmadinejad's presidency, the systematic rape of the culture was facilitated by eliminating subsidies to the cultural products. One of the first outcomes was a sudden increase in the price of paper. This affected the publishing industry to the extent that the number of book readers went down the lowest in recent history.

To make sure that the publishers are completely defeated, censor was tightened to its most suffocating in recent memory. "We specialize in art and literature," says Farkhondeh Hajizadeh, an Iranian writer and publisher, "that's exactly the area that's problematic for officials, not physics and chemistry. Our books have been either banned, or they have faced censorship after a year, or they remain suspended." [1] In addition to that, just recently, the licence of some of the publishers who had expertise in publishing film books, like Nashr-e Cheshmeh, was suspended or revoked. This new decision by censorship was similar to what happened to Jafar Panahi: it's better to dry the fountain rather than monitoring and censoring every drop of water coming out of it.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Last week I wrote about the phenomenon of translating film literature in Iran, a practice that covers anything from film criticism to academic books and papers. I tried to explain how readers in Iran are accustomed to reading the critique of a well-known Iranian writer, next to those of New York Times', Sight & Sound'sor Film Comment's. I argued that the tradition has roots in an particularly Iranian pluralism and unlike the government of countries in which the original pieces have been produced, the juxtaposition of the translated and the original stages a dialogue, even if the authors really haven't planned as such.

Here I like to point to paradoxes (or even ironies) of translating film culture in Iran which I always have associated with the culture of opposition.

For an Iranian cinephile this trend basically means reading about a cinema which is not seen, cannot be seen (or at least, cannot easily be seen or accessed), hence the text substitutes the image. One reads about good or great films in which the text describes significant shots, the summary tells you about the story, the interviews tell you how these films are made, but the actual piece of work is largely absent from the picture. Hereby, the reader/cinephile's role begins: she/he has to re-imagine the film and mentally construct it and the film literature serves as the means of such reconstruction. Consequently, first comes the context and sub-text and then (if you're lucky enough) the Text. Mostly, the access to Text remains impossible and the context becomes the Text itself. Thus the people who portray films in written text, i.e. film writers and critics, become as significant as filmmaker. Under these circumstances, the role of a film critic is elevated to the second author of the film, an intermediary who, in a written text, recreates the filmic pleasures for the reader. In Iran, spectator is the reader. The image is read.

Personal and general notes on "an invention without a future," and its association with other arts, mainly jazz and architecture. For more information about my recent publication and activities please see this page.